Lake Norman Real Estate’s Friday Hot Sheet: August 14, 2009

I always look forward to doing the research for my Friday Hot Sheets because it gives me a chance to see the most recent snapshot of what is REALLY going on with our Lake Norman Real Estate Market. It can be confusing and frustrating to follow the national real estate news because their reports are a month or more behind and our local market is usually quite different from the national trends.

The above chart is a summary of today’s “Hot Sheet” from the Charlotte Multiple Listing Service for single family homes in all of Lake Norman (area 13). These numbers represent a real time snapshot of the past two week’s activity. As always, I have included the past 5 months so that you can put these numbers in perspective.

Highlights:

New listings increased by 5% from July. At a time when our market should be seeing a decrease in active listings as we head into the fall, it is a bit disconcerting to see this number increasing. If we add the new listings of 120 with the 55 properties that came back on the market in reality our inventory increased by 175 homes in the past two weeks. At the same time, if we add the contingent, conditional pending and solds we find that 120 properties were taken out of our number of active listings which means we had a net gain of 55 active listings. (This does not include the properties that were withdrawn or expired).

The number of properties that came back-on-the-market, most likely due to cancelled contracts, dropped slightly. This is always a good sign but not significant enough to substantiate a trend.

The number of price changes increased by 7%. Prices are coming down as you may remember from my July sales analysis. This is a critical component of our Lake Norman housing market recovery….painful but necessary!

Pending home sales remained stable. I actually thought we would see a decline so this is an indication that our August sales may be slightly higher than July.

The number of closed sales in the past two weeks increased 9% over both June and July numbers and are the highest for the entire year. Again, I expected to see sales level off so this may be mean that August will have higher sales than July.

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised to see the strength of the activity in the Lake Norman real estate market for the past two week. While most of the closed sales were under $400,000, there were several over $1million. The interesting details about these higher priced sales is that the closing prices were 70% of the listing price. Prices are coming down in our luxury home market and buyers who have been sitting on the sidelines seem to be dipping their toe in the water.

All in all, these numbers provide a glimmer of hope that we will see stronger sales this month than in July. Perhaps it is due to the fear that interest rates are rising or the impending deadline of the $8,000 First-Time-Buyer rebate, but there does seem to be quantifiable, albeit slight, signs of improvement in the Lake Norman housing market.